Rights of ex-patients in the community: the next frontier.

Perhaps the most significant comment which can be made about the topic of "rights in the community" is simply, that it is a topic. Although the "right to treatment" concept is less than two decades old, 1 questions as to the adequacy of treatment date back, at the least, to the Middle Ages: 2 "right to refuse treatment" theories3 might appear new or "radical" to some;4 however, the origins of the concept date back to Blackstone. 5 Of course, insanity defense questions have plagued the judicial system since Lord Bracton wrote in the 1200's.6 Yet, the seemingly relatively-innocuous topic of "rights of the mentally handicapped in the community" was not even conceptualized as a topic for cocktail party conversation until the past several years;8 although its recent growth has hardly been meteoric,lJ and in spite of general backsliding by the United States Supreme Court in the general area of "rights to services in the community," 10 it has become an area of significance to all practicing mental health attorneys and to mental health professionals as well. Hopefully, it will be one of those areas in which there is general agreement between the two, and, much more importantly, it is likely that it is the one area in which further rights development will realistically be one giant step on the rocky and often Sisyphus-like road towards "normalization" of former patients, as well as a first step towards the meaningful eradication of the stigma of the label of "psychiatric patient." In many ways, of course, the whole bundle of community rights could not have even come into theoretical existence had not the right to treatment and least restrictive alternative litigation developed as they had. Those cases which firmly entrenched the concepts of both procedural! I and substantive!2 due process in the legal fabric of mental health law were the first legal recognition of the overwhelming and virtually irreversible burden which saddled persons labeled deviant by the mental health and judicial systems. Cases such as Lessard v. Schmidt, 13 Wyatt v. Stickney '4 and O'Connor v. Donaldson IS when read together established basic legal principles which would serve as the important groundwork for future legal developments: there is a constitutional right to liberty'h (the "natural state of individuals"):'before one can be